The Ocean Has Polished Our Broken Glass And Turned Into Treasure

Much of the glass humans have broken and thrown away throughout history has ended up in the ocean. Luckily, unlike plastic, glass is a natural material made out of sand, that eventually turns back into sand once it has eroded into tiny enough pieces. Before it breaks all the way back down into sand, it is tumbled by the ocean into these dazzling little stones called “sea glass.”

What's interesting is that when the liquid sand cools, it doesn't transform into the gritty yellow sand that we all know well. Instead, it undergoes a complete transformation with a completely different inner structure. No matter how much you cool the sand, it never solidifies. Instead, it stays in a type of frozen liquid, otherwise known as amorphous solid. This is a cross between liquid and solid with some of the crystalline order of solid and molecular randomness of a liquid.